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I do not disagree with that. The UK clearly cannot get to net zero without what is happening in Scotland. Of course, I would cheekily argue that it cannot get to net zero without the north and the north-east, including the Highlands and Islands. That means that a lot of the focus is on Scotland.

Some of the figures for the economic activity, the export potential of our energy and the investments that are being made are astonishing. The opportunity is huge, but it requires an equally huge response from the Government. We cannot do that within the fiscal framework, in part because of the sums of funding that are involved. We have a capital budget of about £5 billion a year and you know our limits on borrowing. Take ScotWind as one example. Those who have won the leases have, between them all, pledged £25 billion of investment in the supply chain. We have an annual capital budget of £5 billion that is designed to go on hospitals, roads and everything else.

The opportunity is huge. Any other country will respond to that huge opportunity with an equally huge offer. If we want, for example, to take stakes in businesses in the supply chain and ensure that the supply chain is able to respond, the level of demand on a capital level far outstrips the small budget that we have with our enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank. The remarkable thing is that GB energy will not do anything over and above what is already happening with the Scottish National Investment Bank and other players: it will not provide any significant additional capacity. I am delighted that it is to be based in Scotland. It has a role to play. That is great and it is creating a hive of activity around it. However, to meet the scale of need, we all need to get real and get with what people are pledging to invest.

We have a £55 billion overall budget. Just one ScotWind leasing round—it is not even innovation and targeted oil and gas, and it is not onshore, but just offshore—represents £25 billion, which is half the Scottish Government’s budget. That illustrates the scale of what we are talking about.

We set out in our hydrogen action plan the decisions that we would take on hydrogen. As you said, there have been a number of pilots and pockets of activity in hydrogen. I know about the level of activity of interested investors, developers and energy companies that want to explore and develop it, so there is a lot of optimism about the potential.

The key in all the energy industries is to turn potential into reality. We need to work at pace to turn potential interest from investors and developers into activity on the ground. For example, the need to develop the infrastructure for export and build will require close alignment with the UK Government. The big sticking point with generation of renewable energy, particularly offshore wind, is access to the grid.

At the moment, our engagement is positive. We have had a lot of face-to-face engagement. I know that the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, and Gillian Martin have had a number of face-to-face discussions about what each side needs to be doing, but the industry cannot wait for us to keep talking. It needs to see some shared partnership working in getting things done.

Some things have been done around two recent investments. The investment in Ardersier, which we talk about extensively, is about infrastructure and upgrading the facilities there, thereby creating opportunities for other developers to come in. That investment was joint UK Government and Scottish Government funding. The other example is the UK Infrastructure Bank’s investment in Hunterston and XLCC, which complements some funding that the Scottish Government has committed. Those are two examples. We can point to those and see active investment in infrastructure.

The message that I have been sharing is that if the UK Government wants to achieve its aims around energy, it should let us take the lead in Scotland. We, jointly with industry, can give a clear steer on the changes that we need to see in short order. The UK Government, in its early weeks and months, has had a big focus on getting GB energy set up, but when it comes to those questions, we know what needs to be done. It is a clear list, and it is about making the changes and speaking with one voice to give reassurance to those who are minded to invest and are looking at whether they should stay here or go to our European neighbours. A lot of the investors who come to Scotland go on to Scandinavian or European countries. They have options, so we need to ensure that they are here.

I realise that I have been talking at length about investment. Richard Rollison is leading a lot of the work on attracting investment.

I agree with your point about the supply chain. There is a sequence to that. We need to get some of the major developments, particularly offshore, through consenting and planning and into a phase where they are about to build and have pledged funding. In advance of that point, they will look to the Scottish domestic supply chain, and it will be the services and products that are at the most advanced stage that will be able to support the wind or hydrogen opportunities. If they do not exist, investors will look overseas.

I draw a distinction between funding that is spent on digital infrastructure and funding that is spent on technological advancement or digital innovation. We are spending considerable sums of money on the reaching 100 per cent programme. We expect R100 contracts to connect more than 112,000 premises across Scotland before 2028.

The bit that I am more interested in, and that I think you are more interested in, if I am reading you correctly, is innovation. There has been a huge amount of work on that, and one of my priorities is to try to support innovation in the NHS. Neil Gray and I are both leading on that. In a matter of weeks after I came into the Government, we established a round table with a lot of the NHS boards, including the key procurement people in the NHS boards, and some of the most exciting businesses that are working in life sciences, supported by university research and development centres and so on.

The issue that came through from those in life sciences was that their biggest challenge is access to the NHS, and the NHS said that its biggest challenge is that it has to do things in a way that enjoys the public’s support and confidence, so it needs to interact with research and development in a sensitive and careful way. However, some significant progress on innovation in the NHS has come from those conversations.

I talked briefly about the digital dermatology programme, which has been months in the making. It was launched this month and is due to be embedded in 90 per cent of Scotland during the next few months. Use of that technology will massively reduce waiting times for dermatology appointments. The point about that story is that I am not talking about something really exciting in the life sciences sector that is still years away from implementation; that programme is being implemented now.

Technology is one of the most compelling answers to the challenges faced by our NHS. Similar technological advancement is going on for treatment for cancer and diabetes, and we are at the stage of that being implemented in one health board with a view to its being rolled out across all health boards. Mark Logan is supporting that work, and he is bringing his style of thinking to the work of the NHS.

As you can imagine, when it comes to spending any penny at the moment, we must take a very robust approach to the impact that a policy or person has. I am hugely enthusiastic about the work that Mark Logan is doing. The work that he was originally tasked with concerned the network of Techscalers and increasing the pipeline of entrepreneurship and of business start-ups.

The track record of Techscalers has been really inspiring. That major piece of infrastructure has been delivered without much fanfare or noise, and it has not been subject to too many parliamentary questions, nor have too many concerns been raised by Opposition MSPs, because that work has been really successful, and it has exceeded the initial expectations that were set down for numbers of businesses and for the amount of additional funding that businesses have leveraged in. My hope is that that will continue to grow.

I have been very impressed with the metrics. Mark Logan is now working in another area: he is working closely with Neil Gray to deliver more innovation in the national health service. Within a matter of months, I have already seen a step change in some of the work that the NHS is doing in taking some of the most exciting innovations in the life sciences sector and ensuring that there is an open door in the NHS to embed that. From a health service perspective, some of the results are astonishing. One outcome, for example, is that the digital dermatology project can cut waiting lists significantly.

It might be helpful to the committee if I were to write more formally to outline what we think the successes have been of having someone in that adviser role who understands the private sector, who has the confidence of the public sector and who brings a different way of thinking to the work that we are doing on innovation in the public sector.

We certainly moved away from the idea of the business hub, because we wanted to integrate that in the general ecosystem instead of having one site. That decision was based on feedback from women working in that sector.

On the issue of budget decisions, we will continue investing as much as we can in our overall work on digital technology. We have announced a number of funds since 2021 and are investing in female entrepreneurship through every budget, so there is no £50 million pot waiting to be drawn from.

I will give an update on some of the main recommendations. One of Audit Scotland’s recommendations was about political leadership. We did a quick review of governance to look at how we could further strengthen political leadership. On 24 September, the First Minister formally agreed to the creation of a Cabinet sub-committee on investment and the economy, which provides political oversight, with membership across the Cabinet table.

With regard to other recommendations, we have identified additional metrics that can be used to better track outputs and medium-term delivery. Some of that work was already happening—for example, Techscaler data on the spread and impact of member businesses is gathered regularly. The majority of our metrics show positive change, and that was highlighted in the second annual report on NSET. The measures that have been selected for the strategy help us to track progress towards the long-term transformational changes that we seek for our economy. We have monthly metrics that look at things such as gross domestic product growth and job creation, although they are not owned by the NSET team. I do not know whether the committee has seen them yet, but I was heartened to see that the figures that the Royal Bank of Scotland released today show an acceleration in job creation. There are some real positives in that regard.

That also covers evaluation. Audit Scotland recognised that it was too early to assess the impact of NSET, but a section was added to the most recent NSET annual report to discuss the results of early evaluation work.

That covers quite a number of the high-level recommendations that Audit Scotland made.

That is another reason, which I did not give to Colin Smyth, for my strong reluctance to put figures on the finance, because we recognise other partners in the aims of the national strategy for economic transformation, including local authorities and parts of the private sector.

That is where regional economic partnerships come in, because they are partnerships, and I have had extensive engagement with them over the past few months. Just on Monday, I was in Shetland—I was concerned that I might not get back in time for this committee meeting, because I was in Shetland until yesterday afternoon. On Monday, there was the convention of the Highlands and Islands, which is a grouping including all the local authorities that represent coastal areas, stretching from North Ayrshire up to Shetland. Half of the agenda was dedicated to the work of the Highlands and Islands regional economic partnership, which is engaged in attracting new businesses and delivering housing. On a much more nimble, flexible and local level, that group is able to look at similar issues across those areas and work together to find solutions.

I was very clear with the group that I would love NSET to be a very localised strategy, so that the Government at the higher level is an enabler of what goes on locally. At a local level, I would like those partnerships to identify their big priorities and get on with the job, with the confidence of their communities and with the support of national agencies—in that case, Highlands and Islands Enterprise—and, ultimately, with my support. I would like them to do that along the lines of the NSET pillars, because the overarching NSET aims are just as relevant as they were a couple of years ago.

It might be worth saying that, when the strategy was published, there was real pushback about the fact that we had not name checked every sector under the sun, but my view was always that the aims should be sector-neutral. Again, on the point about innovation, the aims should be applicable equally to any sector. If a local regional economic partnership says that its priorities relate to energy—as is the case in the Highlands and Islands, because that is quite obvious—those aims should apply to that industry.

I gave a lot of evidence yesterday to the Finance and Public Administration Committee on our national performance framework changes. That was interesting, because there was a general criticism about there not being enough focus on economic growth in that. I think of the national performance framework as a way of painting a picture of the Scotland that we want to be, and I do not think that there is much disagreement with any of the objectives—there is a general consensus. You have to build a consensus with something like that, when you are talking about people’s health and wellbeing, economic prosperity and so on. The objectives are aligned with the United Nations sustainable development goals, which is a very laudable aim. Keith McDonald is welcome to come in on that.

Again, those objectives set out the picture of the country that we want to be. The First Minister has taken that and distilled it down into four objectives—I am a big fan of distilling things down to fewer objectives. One of those objectives is economic growth. You spoke about what economic growth can lead to, but it does not have to lead to those things. That will depend on what you see as the aim.

The reason why I argued yesterday that economic growth should not be an end in and of itself in the national performance framework is that it is not an end in and of itself. It is a means to an end. If you view it as an end in and of itself, you will absolutely bake in inequality, destroy the environment and so on. You should see it as prosperity with a purpose. In other words, we cannot reinvest revenue into our public services unless we have a growing economy that raises the standard of living for everybody and thus raises the revenue that can be reinvested. We cannot meet our net zero goals unless private investment is made, because the cost of meeting our net zero goals far exceeds the public sector resources of any Government under the sun. We have to be an attractive place to do business so that we get that investment.

My view on economic growth is that it is not an end in and of itself but a means to an end. However, we cannot achieve that end without economic growth—which is perhaps where there would be a minor disagreement between us. I am open to answering any further questions on that.